


Daughters of Hungry Ghosts

by zoicite



Category: Being Human (UK)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Post-Series, Series 5, Vampires being vampires
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-26
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-10 04:28:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zoicite/pseuds/zoicite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Are you ready?” he asks.  “Do you know what to do?”</p><p>Alex nods.  “Sure. I figure out how to get back to 1918, then I convince your friends that you’re an idiot and a liar, that they shouldn’t listen to you, not ever, and then I get them to stop you from ever trying to summon the bloody Devil in the first place.  That sound about right to you?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Hal: 1908  


Hal doesn't think that she stands a chance. She's young and soft. She's never had to work a day in her life. Lady Catherine’s skin looks like milk and he imagines that if he presses his tongue to it, she’ll taste new and just a little sour.

He doesn’t taste her. 

Once he has her away from her mother, he barely even touches her except to thrust her into the arms of his waiting vampires, and later into the room that he’s had them prepare for her. She stumbles and falls to the floor.

It confuses her, he can tell. Young women like this; they’ve been told what will happen to them at the hands of men like him. They’ve been told, but in this case, Lady Catherine’s been lied to. He won’t touch her. That isn’t why she’s here. He wants to keep her guessing.

He looks at her, cowered on the floor of this perfectly civilized and safe bedroom and he anticipates how her terror will spike when he shows her why she’s really here. He anticipates her screams; he wants to relish in them.

He never expects, not even for a moment, that she'll win. 

She screams, yes, she screams at the horror of it, and it’s delicious, the tones of fear in her voice. But after that initial shock, the screams die in her throat, cut off as though strangled. He thinks for a moment that she might faint and he feels disappointment wash over him. The vampires behind him shift, impatient. They’ve been anticipating this too.

How boring. How predictable, this young girl fainting at the feet of a monster. 

She sways for a moment, but she doesn’t fall. She bends to the floor and she picks up the knife that he tossed into the cage with them at the start of this. She picks up the knife and when she stands, her eyes have changed. They're hard now, cold, and it’s then that Hal realizes that he was mistaken in this choice. This girl isn't soft or easy. She's a survivor. There's a killer in her. It’s been asleep for eighteen years, and Hal has managed to rouse her for the very first time.

When it’s over, when the wolf lies dead at her feet, she drops the knife and clutches at her waist, at her torn gown.

“I’ve been hurt,” she says. She says it as though she’s surprised, as though even here, taken by force and thrown into a cage, even here, death was never a realistic option for her.

“You’ll heal,” Hal says. He smiles. He can’t help it. He smiles and then he starts to laugh. One of the vampires standing behind him starts to laugh too, and then the rest join in.

She’s just seen a woman bend and twist and scream. She’s seen her transform into a monster. The smooth young skin of Catherine's stomach is as torn as her dress, Hal can smell the blood that spills out of her, yet here she stands. As they watch, she unfolds beneath the sound of their laughter. She pushes up against it, stands tall and straight. Her clutching hand, red with her own blood, is the only indication that she’s wounded. Everything that had come before, the shy smiles and the blush to her cheeks; it was an act. It was a part that she played, necessary to get ahead in her world. He looks at her, and he can’t help but think that he’s freed her. He wonders if she’ll agree.

Has it taken hold already? Is it already working on her, changing her, this infection that’s started its race through her veins?

"Why Lady Catherine," Hal says. "What a surprise you've turned out to be."

"What happens now?" she asks.

The smile stretches wide across his face.

  
Alex: Present-Day   


"It won't be easy," Hal says.

The man they’ve chosen is on his knees in front of Hal. Tom is behind him, his grip tight as he holds the man’s arms back, keeps him down on the ground.

Alex frowns. "Huh, really? Because I assumed it would be a piece of cake. A walk in the park. Tom, help me out here... easy as pie? Great, and now I’m hungry again."

Hal sighs and shoots her a look. His threshold for exasperation apparently hasn't changed with the re- _re_ -introduction of blood into his diet.  
"I've told you everything you need to know," Hal says.

"I don’t understand. I don’t – is he talking to me?" the man asks Tom. He strains, craning his neck to catch a glimpse of Tom’s face. She’s been dead for so long, but even now she forgets that they can’t see her.

"Shut up, mate," Tom says, leaning down over the man. “It’s rude to interrupt.” He tightens his grip on the man’s arms and the man grunts at the uncomfortable angle at which Tom pulls his limbs.

Hal waits to make sure that Tom has things under control and then he turns back to Alex.

"I've told you everything you need to know," Hal repeats, but it isn't true. Alex hardly knows anything at all. Sure, she knows that the mess they’re in now started in 1918. She knows the location: France, and the players: Hal Yorke, a werewolf named Lady Catherine Glass, a ghost named Emil Parsons. She knows who she should be looking for – not Hal. She's staying far away from Hal – and she generally knows what they look like. She knows the details there.

It's all the bits in between that are fuzzy. Hal's never been to purgatory. None of them have. They're running on the assumption that what Annie said about the baby was true – that the baby grew up and then came back through purgatory and managed to change the future. If Eve Sands can do it, why not Alex Millar? Why not Hal Yorke and Tom McNair?

Annie went to purgatory and she came back. She went through doors that weren't hers more than once. According to Tom, even John Mitchell, a vampire, went through a door and came back unscathed.

The Men with Sticks and Ropes are probably busy anyway, right? This is an apocalypse. Purgatory's gotta be getting pretty crowded by now.

"Do you think there'll be a queue?” she asks. “Maybe I should bring a book.”

Hal ignores her attempt at humor. “Are you ready?” he asks. “Do you know what to do?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Alex says. “I figure out how to get back to 1918, then I convince your friends that you’re an idiot and a liar, that they shouldn’t listen to you, not ever, and then I get them to stop you from ever trying to summon the bloody Devil in the first place. That sound about right to you?”

This time she caught the hint of a smile pulling at the edge of Hal’s mouth before he caught himself and pushed it back into a frown. He nods.

“Close enough.”

“And then I stake you,” Alex concludes. She doesn’t mean it, not really. She should mean it. She really wishes that she did.

Hal ignores her and takes a step toward Tom. Tom recognizes his cue and pulls the man up from the floor so that he’s standing between Tom and Hal, his hands still held tight behind his back. Hal reaches out and touches the man’s jaw with the tips of his fingers. Tom’s face is twisted, his eyes hard and his mouth a frown.

"Don't worry," Hal says. He's talking to Tom, Alex knows, though he's still looking at the human. "If this works and Alex succeeds, none of this will have happened. This man won't have to die after all."

"What?" the man asks, just before Hal’s teeth descend and he rips into the man’s throat.

Alex doesn't turn away. She watches as Hal tears into the neck of the victim a second time before he latches on, makes himself at home. It's important, she thinks, to watch this, to remember why they're doing this; to see what they've become.

She realizes after a moment that her hand is at her own neck. She's been here. She knows how this feels and – she turns away. She stares at the wall and she waits for the sound the man makes when Tom and Hal release him, when his lifeless body slumps to the floor of this house, and then she turns back to find them staring down at him, blood dripping from Hal’s chin.

Alex looks around the room, but they seem to be alone. 

“Where is he?” Alex asks.

“Give it a moment,” Hal says. His voice sounds thick and wet and if Alex was capable of feeling, she thinks she might feel pretty nauseated by the sound, by the picture that the three of them have made together.

Alex is starting to worry. What if he’s in another room? What if he finds his door and goes through it before she can follow? What if – 

She brushes past Hal and glances around the corner into the corridor. Empty. 

She looks into the kitchen. Nothing.

And then she turns back to find the man standing there behind Tom and Hal, watching them unnoticed.

“Hey,” Alex says. 

He looks up at her.

“I think he killed me," the man says. “Look, that body there on the floor. That’s me. How – They murdered me.”

Tom flinches a little at that, but it's true. He held the man down, restrained him. The man's blood is red on Tom's hands. 

"They – "

"I know," Alex says. She’s standing beside the man now and she reaches out and touches his shoulder. "Listen, I'm not very good at this, but –”

Something in the room shifts, almost imperceptible, but Alex feels it, the man feels it, and he turns to stare. A door has appeared where one didn’t exist before.

"What –?"

"That's for you. And me. We're going to go together, all right?"

"Yeah," he says. "Yeah, all right." He seems a little dazed. Is that how it went for her? She barely remembers. She remembers Cutler’s voice and that damp cellar. She remembers cowering in the corner out of sight, thinking somehow she’d managed to get away, she was safe after all, she’d outsmarted him, but – 

"What's your name?"

"Stuart," he says.

"Hey, Stuart. I'm Alex."

Stuart nods, but he isn’t really paying much attention to her. He’s just staring at the door. He starts to reach for it and Alex puts a hand on his arm to stop him. She turns back toward Tom and Hal.

"So this is it then," Alex says.

"We'll see you when you get back," Tom dutifully returns with a nod. He isn’t fooling anyone; he looks worried.

Hal doesn't say anything. She thinks that tells her all she needs to know. She wonders suddenly if that's his plan. First he gets rid of his ghost, then he deals with the werewolf, and finally he gives in; he stands at the Devil’s side.

“Stay here,” she says to Stuart. She holds up a finger. “Stay for just one more minute, okay?”

Stuart shrugs, but he doesn’t move when she releases his arm. 

She reaches for Tom, pulls him into a tight hug.

"You keep him out of trouble, all right?" she says. It's a joke, of course. A pretty lame one if she's being honest. Hal's nothing but trouble. A lost cause. The only reason they continue to hold on to him is because, well, he isn't on the Devil's side, not yet, so she guesses that puts him on theirs. "Watch your back, all right? I don't want to run into you on the other side of that door."

She turns and points a finger at Hal. “And don’t you try anything funny. I don’t want to find out that this is some fucked up plan to get rid of us. I’ll come back and I’ll haunt your arse.”

Hal smiles just a little at that. 

In truth, she doesn't really believe that Hal wants to be rid of them. If he did, she knows he would have been gone long before this.

“Good luck,” he says, and it sounds like he means it.


	2. Chapter 2

Hal: 1908

She has no idea what has happened to her. She has no idea what she is. It's more interesting – more enjoyable – than Hal ever imagined it might be when he first threw her into that cage.

Lady Catherine doesn't seem to realize that she's surrounded by monsters pretending to be men. Yes, yes, of course she thinks that they're monsters for holding her here, for taking her away from her home under false pretenses, for throwing her into a cage with a beast and watching, waiting, for her to succumb, to be torn to shreds, but to think you're dealing with human monsters when in truth, you're dealing with so much worse – well, it's all part of the fun.

Hal folds his arms over his chest and turns his back toward the window as another vampire, Elizabeth, pushes aside the fabric of Lady Catherine's dressing gown to check her bandages.

"That thing – it was a woman," Lady Catherine says, trying to work it out. She lifts her arms to give Elizabeth better access.

Hal turns at the sound of her voice, but stays behind her, affording her some level of privacy.

"Yes," Hal says. "It was a werewolf."

Lady Catherine is silent. She gasps when Elizabeth finishes unwrapping the bandage and pulls the cloth away from her skin. Elizabeth's eyes go black at the blood and she turns away quickly so that Catherine doesn't notice. Hal catches the change and turns to give Elizabeth a pointed look.

"Here," he says. He reaches for Elizabeth and pulls her away. "Let me."

Catherine grows stiff at his proximity when he sits down beside her, tries to turn away. Hal is gentle with her, impersonal. His fingers don't linger.

When he speaks, his voice is calm, soft. "Elizabeth, as it turns out, is a bit more squeamish than she let on."

Elizabeth, for her part, is standing by the window. She leans on the frame and tries to get control of herself. She’s been a vampire less than a year. It was stupid to enlist the help of one so new, lacking any semblance of self control.

Catherine is frowning. "A werewolf," she repeats. 

Hal raises his eyebrows, pretends to be preoccupied with his work as he inspects her wound.

"Mm," he says.

"You threw me into a cage with a werewolf," Catherine says again.

"Yes," Hal says. "And you took care of our dog problem rather efficiently in the end, didn't you? We thank you for that."

"You wanted to watch it kill me," Catherine says. She put that much together right at the start

"Well, you've proven yourself far more interesting than I originally imagined you might," Hal says with a smile. "As such, the plan has changed. Lift your arms."

She does as she’s instructed and he wraps her wound with fresh cloth. When he stands and moves away from her, the look in her eyes tells him everything that he needs to know. She will play along until she has healed. And then she will plot her escape. She will try to kill Hal just as she killed the wolf in that cage.

Hal looks forward to it.

"Elizabeth," Hal beckons. Elizabeth starts and then rushes past them both, out into the less intoxicating air of the corridor.

Hal bows. "Lady Catherine," he says, and then steps back out of her room.

Outside, he glares at Elizabeth. "Get a hold of yourself," he snaps. 

She snarls at him and stalks off. He doesn’t follow her. He stands there outside of Lady Catherine’s door, the bloodied bandage held tight in his hand. Finally, he gives in. He lifts it to his nose, then brings it to his lips, presses his tongue to the fabric. The curse isn’t finished with her, not yet. The blood is old, brown on the cloth, but it sparks against his tongue anyway and he moans at the taste of her.

How would she taste pouring over his tongue? Would he feel it then, her curse? How long before it’s too late and she becomes poison to him? 

He stands there in the corridor, his eyes black and his hands twisting the fabric of the bandage. He isn’t sure how long he manages; it feels like minutes, hours, but it’s likely mere seconds. He stands there and then he snaps; he gives in. He drops the bandage on the floor of the corridor, pushes back into her room, and sinks his teeth into her neck.

Alex: Purgatory

The corridor is long and lined with doors. She squints, but she can’t tell if there are turns and branches up ahead or if it just keeps going on like this forever. The doors are all a bit different, but somehow exactly the same too.

“Huh,” Alex says. It really is just a corridor.

“Well, this is a bit weird,” Stuart states, apparently over some of his earlier shock. “I expected there’d be fluffy clouds and angels when I died.”

“Disappointing, isn’t it?” Alex asks.

“Yeah,” Stuart agrees. He pushes his glasses up on his nose. She wonders if he can see without them now that he’s dead. “What now?”

“I don’t know,” Alex says. “Let me just –” 

She glances behind her, but the door they’ve come through is shut. She pulls at the handle; it doesn’t budge. 

“Hal!” she calls. “Tom?”

Nothing. She leans against the door, presses her forehead to the wood and takes a deep breath. “All right,” she says. “We’re here. I guess we just start walking.”

She pushes herself upright and turns to find that Stuart is gone.

“Stuart?”

No answer. He’s just gone, vanished, like she walked through that door all on her own. 

“Huh,” Alex says again. 

She thinks, though she only knew Stuart for a few minutes, that she might actually miss him. His comment about fluffy clouds and angels, that was cute and she wonders suddenly what he was like, what kind of person he was. Anyway, it’s too late now, and hopefully, once she’s done what she’s come here to do, it won’t matter anyway. 

The corridor is quiet except for the flicker and buzz of the fluorescent lights that line the ceiling. The lights give the corridor the feel of an abandoned school or an office building or somewhere equally as unpleasant. Any moment now all of the doors will open and dead guys in suits will come ambling out, feet dragging behind them, hands outstretched toward her neck.

They probably won’t be zombies though. Who needs zombies when you’re in the realm of the Men with Sticks and Rope? 

All right, now she’s starting to freak herself out. It’s just a boring empty corridor. Really, she sort of thought that whoever designed purgatory (God? The Devil? The Men?) would have been more creative than this. Actually, never mind. This totally makes sense. She’s met the Men and she met the Devil and neither seemed particularly into aesthetics.

“No welcoming committee, then? Hello?”

Her voice echoes a little in the passage, but no one answers. Call her crazy, but she sort of thought someone would care that she’s broken into purgatory. The Devil sent his creepy henchman after her before, after all, surely they remember her, surely they sense that she – 

“Oh, shut up, Alex,” Alex mutters as she starts walking down the corridor. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and all that. 

She has no idea what she’s doing. She has no idea how she’s supposed to begin to guess what she should be doing. She’s in a corridor in purgatory and somehow she has to get from where she started, apocalyptic 2013, all the way back to 1918. Simple. Piece of cake!

She pauses. “I wonder if I can eat cake here.”

Not that she would eat cake here if she encountered any. What does cake have to do to end up in purgatory anyway? Whatever it is, it can’t be good.

She walks for a long time. She figures none of the doors near the one she entered could possibly lead somewhere like 1918. They probably order these things somehow, right? There has to be a system. If she was designing purgatory, she’d order it chronologically, which means that where she is now has to be relatively recent. She probably hasn’t even made it back to the 1990s. 

Eventually she starts to worry. She thinks she’s being pretty logical, but maybe she’s figuring it all wrong. Maybe there is no logic here and she’s already missed the door that she needs. It’d help if there was someone around that she could ask, but the whole place seems uncomfortably deserted. Maybe she should open one of these doors, just to check.

She turns to her right, doesn’t hesitate, reaches for the knob and yanks the door open. 

She’s in the cellar. Her body’s gone, whisked away by Rook and his men in grey, but there’s her blood, pooled on the floor, maggots twisting and turning in the mess. Alex stands there, stares at it, stunned and stupid for just a moment before she steps back into the corridor and pulls the door shut.

Definitely not 1918 then.

She feels her heart racing, which is ridiculous, really, since she has no heart. Not anymore. She’s just…whatever she is – some kind of invisible shell of herself. She still feels like she has a heart though and she closes her eyes, leans against the wall and waits for it to slow.

She’d been in that cellar for hours before Cutler actually got around to killing her. He’d had her bound and gagged, just kneeling there while he talked and talked, on and on and on. It seemed like he was practicing some sort of speech, like maybe she was the only one that he could find to listen, which was pathetic, really, considering that he clearly had a whole bunch of vampire goons doing his dirty work for him. Couldn’t he pay them to listen to the details of his master plan? Couldn’t he threaten them, make them listen to his tedious monologue? Nothing that he said made any sense to her at the time anyway. He was like the villain in a bad movie and if he let her get a word in once in a while, she thinks she probably would have told him so. She didn’t get a word in though. She just got torn apart. 

She thinks that, overall, she handled it pretty well. She took her own death pretty well, all things considered. Yes, she spent hours cowered in the back of that room convinced that maybe she’d escaped, maybe she was still alive. She spent hours back there making plans, thinking about how she was going to get out of the cellar and finish her holiday. But even so, all things considered, a ghost isn’t left with as much trauma from death as you’d maybe expect. Anyway, she’s good now. She’s here in bloody purgatory and she’s going to save the fucking world.

Alex stands up straight, pulls herself together, and starts moving again. She comes to an intersection and stops, unsure what to do. She turns left, then opens the first door she encounters and steps inside. 

She’s in her old bedroom. She can hear her brothers shouting somewhere else in the house, but her room is empty; she’s alone. The place is a fucking mess. Her bed’s unmade and there are piles of clothes obscuring most of the floor. There’s a plate with uneaten pizza crusts on the floor. One of the crusts has fallen off the plate and is hidden halfway beneath her bed. She’s pushed everything off of her desk and there are papers and pens and old CD cases littering the floor by her chair. The radio is on, playing a Leona Lewis song that Alex has always hated. Alex sits down on the edge of her bed. 

“This is how it works then,” she guesses. “Like some Ghost of Christmas Past shite, huh? You have to walk back into all of your least favorite memories before you get to where you’re looking to go?”

This is the week after her mum left. Her father still thought she might come back, but Alex knew. Alex knew right away that she was gone for good. She thought – well, sure, she thought she might see her again. She didn’t think she’d just wake up one morning to find that her mother was out of her life for good, but Alex knew in her heart that her mother wouldn’t be coming home. She knew as soon as she tried to ring her mother’s mobile only to discover that it was still there, sitting on the kitchen counter, abandoned like the rest of them. Her father rang everyone her mum knew, but there was no trace of her. It was like she’d disappeared off the face of the planet. She was just gone and they were left here, left here to keep moving forward without her. Alex was left here to fill the hole her mother had left.

Alex still doesn’t understand. She still doesn’t know what she did – what they did – four children and a husband who often acted like he was the fifth. She understands that. She understands that it was difficult sometimes, but she’d sort of thought they were happy? Her mother laughed with them and joined in with their games and Alex had really believed that everything was fine.

Static interrupts the music coming from the radio. Alex reaches out and hits it without really thinking about it, like she did so many times when she was alive and living in this room.

“Alex?” 

Alex starts. She hits the radio again, but the static doesn’t dissipate.

“Hello?” Alex says, leaning in close to the radio.

“Alex, is that you?” It’s a woman’s voice, but it crackles and jumps and Alex can’t – 

“Who’s there?” Alex asks, but the radio clears and the voice is replaced with an overplayed song by Take That.

There’s a knock on her bedroom door and Alex jumps, accidentally pushes the radio off the bedside table and onto the floor.

“Alex,” her father calls. “We’re going to be late.”

“Fuck,” Alex curses as she stands and backs away from the door. If her father is calling her, then where is she? Shouldn’t she be here, the real her? She doesn’t remember where they’re going - she doesn’t remember –

“Alex,” her father calls again. His hand is on the knob and it’s starting to turn and Alex does the only thing that she can think to do. She runs back through the door into purgatory, pulling it shut behind her just as her father starts to push open the door to her bedroom.

She’s breathing hard and she bends over, her hands on her knees. She wonders what would have happened if she’d stayed. Would her father have seen her? Could she have hugged him, pressed her face to his shoulder? Would it have felt more real than it had in Hatch’s dream world, when he smiled and didn’t question any of the lies, just seemed happy to know that his daughter was alive after months of thinking her dead?

There’s a noise in the corridor. She stands, stretches her back and then listens. After a moment it comes again, and this time she recognizes it; the flapping of wings, like a bird caught somewhere in the passage. She steps carefully back toward the intersection, looks around the corner, back toward the way she came. There’s nothing there, but the noise comes again, this time from behind her, and she whips around, ready to fend off a crazy bird attack.

She’s alone and she sighs, pushes a hand back through her hair, and laughs at herself for being so jumpy. She waits, but the noise doesn’t come again.

“All right,” she says, her voice loud to her own ears. 

If she can’t get away from her own life, how is she ever going to make it back a hundred years into someone else’s?

“How the fuck does this place work?”


	3. Chapter 3

Hal: 1908

He doesn't kill her. He doesn't bed her, but he does come to her, again and again. He comes to her and he tastes her. He bites her neck, her wrists, her thigh. He moans when her blood hits his tongue. He tastes the infection as it slowly starts to spoil her, as it changes her. He can’t get enough and he knows that this can only be temporary. He knows that if he doesn't stop soon, he'll take it too far. The infection will outlast him, will surpass him, and he’ll end up a pile of dust on her floor.

"Why don't you kill me?" Catherine asks. "Why don't you get it over with?"

She sounds so much older than she did when she arrived, though it's only been two weeks. She seemed a girl to him then. No longer.

"Humans are always so shortsighted," Hal returns. And then he remembers. She isn't human, not anymore. He laughs, mouth stretched and sharp teeth bared. What will she do when she learns the truth of everything that has happened to her?

Her stomach has largely healed and Hal’s careful. He’s full when he comes to her, limits her blood loss. He doesn’t want to miss out on what’s to come. 

"What is it that you want then?" she asks. "Why don't you get to it? Why don't you end this?"

He wonders at her motive in suggesting such a thing. She's stopped fighting him. She lets him have his tastes, lets him sit there afterward, his eyes closed, his mouth open, lips red and the lines of his arousal clear beneath his trousers. He expects that she will come at him one of these days. He expects her to fight. Her suggestion to him now is ridiculous, out of character. He thinks it must be bait, and he decides to play along.

"What makes you think that I want more than this?" Hal asks. "Do I seem unfulfilled by our visits?" 

He picks himself up from the floor. He turns and leans over her. His eyes wander and then rise to meet hers. 

"Or is it you who is left wanting, Lady Catherine? Is there something that you're trying to tell me? Something that you'd like to ask of me?"

She pushes at him, shoves him away from her. He stumbles back from the bed, wipes at his mouth, and smiles.

She was so eager when her mother invited him to dinner, so desperate to please, to escape. Her face flushed beautifully when he asked her to walk with him through her father's gardens. His men were waiting for them exactly where he'd instructed.

Not anymore. 

She starts lashing out in earnest a week before the full moon. She screams and throws herself against the door. When he enters the room she hits him about the face, attempts to kick him in the groin. He’s ready for her, fights back, gets her pressed up against the wall of the room. He moves in toward her neck and he feels the shift in himself, the monster rising to the surface. 

He touches his teeth to her throat, careful, gentle, even with her struggling beneath him. His tooth scratches at one of the older wounds and a drop of blood wells up. He touches his tongue to the tip of his tooth. It burns, a warning, and he knows then that it’s over. The infection has completed its work on her, completed its transformation of her. She’s poison to him now. 

He pushes away from her. 

“What are you doing?” she asks. “What now?”

Her confusion grows as she watches him, as she watches his eyes clear. He spits onto the floor and she frowns, her fingers coming up to press at her neck.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

Hal pauses. Is that – could it really be disappointment in her voice? Hurt? Has she actually come to anticipate these encounters, this violation –

"No," Hal laughs, surprised. "You haven't really started to – Oh, this is better than I ever hoped."

"What?" Catherine asked.

"Nothing," Hal says. He moves back toward her. His teeth are still down and he knows it's dangerous, tempting himself this way, but he has to – yes, look at her. Look at her moving, pushing, almost imperceptible, toward him. She can't help herself, she's –

He kisses her and she kisses him back, doesn't hesitate for a moment. She reaches up, her hands twisting into the fabric of his shirt, holding him close. A moment ago she was fighting him, her fists flying at his face, and then surrender, and now this. Ah, a werewolf before a full moon. Was there anything more unpredictable? Was there anything more... predictable?

The kiss doesn’t last long. It isn’t long before Lady Catherine regains her senses, before she twists away from him, before her hands come up to his chest and push him, hard. He stumbles back, smiles, wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

It’s going to be an interesting week.

Alex: Purgatory

There it is again; the sound of wings flapping somewhere close by, some poor bird lost in purgatory.

It sounds closer now than it did before and Alex waits, still expecting it to burst from one of the corridors, to fly at her in its frantic confusion, its feet pulling at her hair. Nothing ever comes and after a moment, she starts walking again.

She isn’t sure how long she’s been here. It feels like it’s been some time. The corridor turned and split, the decor change, and she kept walking. She just goes with her gut and turns in whichever direction her feet take her. Once in a while she’ll hear noises; the creak of the floor, the flapping of the lost bird’s wings, the sound of a door slamming shut, and she stops and waits, but nothing ever happens. There’s never anyone there.

She feels like she’s being watched. Her skin crawls and she shifts her shoulders beneath the confines of her jacket. She wonders if she can remove it here, but she doesn’t stop to find out.

Alex was counting the doors when she first started walking. She passed ten, twenty, but she stopped counting somewhere around thirty. She must have passed more than sixty doors by now. She must be back to the first days of her life, her first steps, her first word, maybe even beyond that. Maybe she’s gone right past the start of her life and she’s back in someone else’s now. She pulls open a door, determined to find out.

She’s in a bar. It’s empty and she looks out toward the windows and the street, squints into the sun. There are empty wine glasses on the bar, two stools pulled closer together than the rest. 

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Alex says, the words drawn out as she pieces it all together.

She was sure she’d come so far. The corridor changed, she’d made countless turns! She thought surely - but this is closer to where she started than the last door she entered! 

Alex sighs and sits down at the bar. She picks up one of the glasses, studies the small puddle of wine left in the bottom. 

She dies today. She’s leaving this restaurant, her head down as she stares at the cracks in the pavement, as she curses her own stupid judgment. Stupid to think that she might even have liked him, that he might have been good for her in some weird way. She’d walked into that café and he’d been so awkward, so nervous with those booties covering his shoes. It was adorable. And then the museum – he wasn’t like any of the other blokes she spent her time with. That’s what she’d thought. She liked watching him stumble over his words, fidget and avert his eyes. He could hardly speak to her and she thought that maybe it meant that he really fancied her.

He did seem to be really into her here, leaning over her, leering at her. The rest of it – what was that? She’d thought the change in him was maybe an act or alcohol. She’d never guessed.

She’d thought – it sounds so stupid that she almost doesn’t want to admit it, not even to herself. 

She thought that it would be nice. She thought that he would be shy, appreciative, attentive. Maybe a little clumsy. She thought that, even when it was all said and done, holiday over, back home – she thought he might think about her sometimes. She thought she might think about him.

Well, she was right about that bit. She certainly still thinks about him, and he probably still thinks about her!

Alex presses her fingers to the edge of the bar, the corner pressing lines into the pads of her fingers.

“I don't understand. Haven’t we already been through this?” she asks the empty room. The cellar, now the bar. It’s all a bit redundant. Surely she’s done other interesting and depressing things during her 22 years that she could revisit in... whatever this is. Some fucked up game of “This is Your Life?”

Maybe that’s the point though? Maybe she’s stuck with this because it’s what she’s chosen to remain stuck with. Is purgatory trying to torture her or provide free therapy? And if so, then what’s next? Hal’s not here. He's back in the world with Tom. It can't be Hal, so what then? A heart-to-heart with Nick Cutler? 

She shudders at the possibility.

It’s a good question though, now that she's thought it. Is this where vampires go when they die? Do vampires go anywhere at all or do they just… crumble into dust? She kind of thinks everything ends up here, at least for a while. And if Cutler is here, maybe she can find. Maybe… who knows. Not a heart-to-heart, but she could torture him or something?

It’s a nice thought - a bit of revenge - but she’s afraid that, even after all this time, it might end up going the other way. Watching Nick Cutler burn up, watching as Annie pushed a stake through his heart; that should be revenge enough, shouldn’t it? He’s dead and gone and that’s it. She thought she was done with it. She’d moved on. Or, well, no. She was stuck. She was a ghost, but she’d moved on as best she could, better than you'd think given the circumstances.

Alex gets up from her stool and leaves the bar. She crosses the corridor and pulls open the door opposite. 

It’s the back of the van Cutler’s goons used to transport her to the club. There are the handcuffs on the floor - not the ones they used to fasten her hands behind her back; they left those on, along with the gag over her mouth, until they got her into that room in the basement. She remembers kneeling back here, crawling around blindly, her hands cuffed behind her back. The vampire driving hit a bump and she'd lost her balance and hit her head against these shelves along the wall. She reaches up to touch her forehead, remembers how much it hurt. If she'd lived long enough, it would have blossomed into a nice bright bruise. She remembers throwing herself against the back doors, trying to push the handles with the side of her face while the vampires up front watched her and laughed.

Alex pinches her eyes shut and takes a deep breath. All right, so they’re obviously playing with her. Someone’s watching her and rather than just stop her, rather than intervene, they’ve decided to make a game of it. That’s great. That’s really nice. They know that she’s here and they’re playing with her; she’s sure of it.

Alex pushes back through the door of the van and into the corridor. Somewhere nearby three doors slam shut at once. She jumps, surprised by the sound, and then it’s back, the flapping of those damn birds’ wings. 

“Okay,” Alex says. Yeah, she can admit it. If this is some kind of game, it's working. She's completely creeped out and totally unsettled. She takes a deep breath. “Okay.” 

Maybe this is just where pigeons go when they die too. Maybe pigeons die and then go through their tiny little pigeon doors, flapping around until they figure out what's supposed to come next. Or maybe it’s like one of those CDs of creepy Halloween music that someone’s got playing on repeat over a system of speakers? She’s sure it isn’t either of those things, but the thought of one of the Men with Sticks and Rope sitting in some cupboard of a room somewhere intensely pressing play on a CD player is less scary than any of the other options. So yeah, okay… she’ll go with that.

A door creaks open, and Alex turns to look left and then right, but nothing in the corridor has changed. It must be a door hidden somewhere, around one of the corners, perhaps back the way she came. 

“Hello?” Alex asks.

The door slams shut. This time she thinks she knows which direction it came from, but she still can’t see that anything in the corridor has changed.

She listens hard, listens for footsteps or voices, but she hears nothing other than the occasional flapping of wings.

Her foot slides in something on the floor and she lifts her boot, looks at a small red smear left there on the tile. She scrapes her foot along the floor and a gooey looking blob of pink comes off the bottom of her boot. 

Shit. Shit, what the hell is that? She shakes her hands at her sides. She's going to panic. She's going to - Okay. Breathe, Alex. You might not have lungs anymore, but just stand here for a moment. Breathe. 

She stares at the spot of pink goo on the floor. She closes her eyes and she sees Cutler’s flesh falling from his face and his fingers, singed and wet and sticky. She watched him crumble into dust, into powder, bone-dry, but bits of his flesh that had fallen before he was staked still sat in gooey little drops on the floor. She couldn’t smell or feel, but she gagged as she watched Annie scrub at the carpet.

"Come on, Alex," she says. This is nothing. She's been living through a fucking apocalypse for God's sake. She's seen so much worse than this since then, but somehow it still - 

In films vampires neatly pierce the neck of a human victim. Two puncture wounds, elegant and clean. The victim, usually female, has just one small smudge of blood on her neck when it’s over and done. That's all. In the films it looks like she enjoys it. She sighs and she gasps and she clings to her vampire, holds him close. It’s sexy and sensual and – it’s utter shite. It’s fucking bullshit is what it is.

In truth, vampires are disgusting. They pull and they tear. They rip a huge obscene gash into the neck of the victim and they bathe in her blood. They leave you there, ripped open, a mess, half of your blood wasted on the concrete floor, like it’s not even worth saving, like it doesn’t matter at all. The other half they collect in a bottle, a fucking bottle, like they’re tapping a tree for its sap. But hey, if you’re lucky then maybe days later their friend will drop by and lick up what’s been spilt, maggots and all.

In the beginning, she tried to remind herself of this as she talked to Hal. She reminded herself of the way he looked crouched on the concrete floor, his tongue lapping up her congealed blood. She remembered the way that he looked at her wasted body, the look of longing on his face as he stared at that ragged tear in her neck.

Whatever this is, it sure isn’t a fucking film.

Something in the air changes, and Alex starts to tense up, waiting. Something's about to happen. She can feel it building around her. It's like the corridor is charging up, and she knows that she doesn't have a lot of time. She needs to decide what she's going to do right now. 

She’s sure suddenly that Cutler is here somewhere, roaming these corridors, his skin burning and peeling, dripping from his chin, leaving slippery messes just like the one on the bottom of her boot.

That’s why they keep sending her back into those moments. They’re playing with her and what’s next? A heart-to-heart with Nick Cutler, and she’s tough; she’s been through a lot, a fucking apocalypse, and - No. She isn’t here to deal with this insignificant bullshit. That's what Cutler is in the end, isn't he? Insignificant bullshit. Dead and gone. Fuck this! She has more important things she needs to do.

Alex crouches down and starts pulling at the laces of her boots, tying them tightly to her feet as though they might fall off. Maybe they can here, she doesn’t know. She ties them tight and then she starts to run.


End file.
